How Valve's CS2 Regional Standings Are Built and Used for Invites

Valve's monthly Regional Standings update of October 5, 2026 put Spirit first with 2,046 points and Legacy second with 1,931, according to the lists Valve publishes in its public repository. Those numbers matter because Valve's own tournament rules tie invitations to them, and PGL set November 2 as the VRS deadline for the Major in Singapore, according to Insider Gaming's coverage of PGL's announcement.

Valve's foreword to its operation requirements says the rules limit the ability to invite teams directly and define the types of tournaments Valve considers in its official ranking system. Valve also uses the standings to invite teams to the Major. That is why a change in how the lists are built, or in who may appear on which list, can decide whether a roster gets into an event. This guide explains how the Valve Regional Standings (VRS) rank rosters, what goes into the points, how often the lists change, how organizers and the Major use them, and which rule changes Valve has published. It also says plainly which Valve documents are current as of October 22, 2026 and which are not.

Valve's October 5, 2026 standings files and its Major Supplemental Rulebook, as published in Valve's repositories.

What the standings rank, and what they are for

The VRS rank rosters, not organizations. Valve's Tournament Operation Requirements define a roster as a collection of five specific players, whatever team organization they are currently attached to. The same document calls the VRS the official system for ranking the performance of rosters, published monthly, and the basis for what it calls Direct VRS Invites.

There are four lists. Three are regional: Europe, the Americas and Asia. The fourth is a global list. Valve's Major Supplemental Rulebook says the three regional lists are the ones used for Major invitations, while the global version is used only to seed the stages of the Major after invitations have been accepted.

Each roster sits on one regional list. The October 5, 2026 files show 245 rosters on the Europe list, 89 on the Americas list and 46 on the Asia list, which adds up to the 380 on the global list.

Which Valve documents exist and how current they are

Valve publishes the VRS material in two public repositories, and the documents are not all the same age. Dates below are the dates Valve's repositories record for each file's last change.

The introduction file of the standings repository was last changed on August 26, 2024. It lists only three broad factors: the team's prize money, the prize money and number of teams its beaten opponents had, and head-to-head results. It says the code and a sample dataset would follow in the coming weeks and that the model shipped then would be used through the next Major. Because the model has been updated several times since, that file is a statement of intent from 2024, not a description of today's model.

The model code in the same repository was last changed on August 5, 2025. Alongside the code, Valve publishes a details page for every roster on every list, and those pages explain each roster's number step by step. The most recent monthly files are dated October 5, 2026. The event data behind them is credited, at the foot of each details page, to HLTV.

The rules for organizers live in the second repository. The Tournament Operation Requirements were last changed on December 8, 2025, in a commit that added requirements for both ranked and unranked events. The Major Supplemental Rulebook was last changed on October 6, 2026, and the list of exceptions on October 7, 2026.

As of October 22, 2026, those are the Valve documents on the subject. Every mechanism below comes from a details page, the code, the rulebook or the operation requirements.

How a roster ends up on a list

Valve's code treats a roster as the same roster across matches if it shares at least three players with an earlier one.

Valve's August 5, 2025 change added a minimum participation requirement: a player appears on a roster's active list only after playing at least 5 of the roster's last 10 matches. Valve's own note on that change says that, as a result, some rosters may not have five players shown.

Some matches are filtered out before any points are calculated. According to the code, a match must have five players on each side, event stages that have not finished are ignored, showmatches are removed, and, for matches from the start of 2025 onward, only matches that Valve flags as ranked are kept. To be shown on a list at all, the code requires at least five matches played and at least one roster beaten. A note Valve attached to its September 9, 2026 update adds that the September 7 lists were recalculated as of 23:59:59 on September 7 and exclude matches from events that had not completed by then.

The region comes from the players. The Major Supplemental Rulebook says a roster's Regional Assignment is the region represented by the majority of its players. In a tie, the region with greater representation in the Major wins, in the order Europe, then the Americas, then Asia. On June 16, 2025, Valve's changelog added that teams now appear on a single list only; before that, according to HLTV's report of June 17, 2025, a team with no three-player majority from one region could be tied between two regions and could choose which one it represented.

What goes into the points

The details page for each roster lists four factors. Valve's page says the starting value is built from the average of those four.

Three terms in the table need explaining. The curve is the formula Valve prints on every details page: 1 divided by the sum of 1 and the absolute value of the base-10 logarithm of the value. It flattens the top of the scale, so extra prize money matters less once a roster is already near the top. The age weight lowers the value of old results. In Valve's code, results from the most recent 30 days keep full weight and then fade in a straight line to zero at six months, which matches the figures on the details pages: on the October 5 lists a result from August 31 carries a weight of 0.965 and one from June 20 carries 0.488.

The event weight comes from the event's prize pool. According to the code, the pool is capped at $1,000,000 and run through the same curve, so a $1,000,000 event carries a weight of 1.000. The August 5, 2025 change also lets qualifiers and group stages that lead into later stages add part of the final stage's prize pool to their own. In the code, the added share is halved for each step along the chain.

Valve's page for Spirit shows the arithmetic. Its top ten scaled winnings came to $1,058,245.04, the fifth highest such total among all rosters was $479,090.66, and dividing the first by the second and capping at 1 gives a Bounty Offered of 1.000. Its four factors were 1.000, 0.872, 0.398 and 0.932, which average 0.800.

That average is then stretched across a fixed range. Valve's page gives the formula as 400 plus the roster's average minus the lowest average, divided by the highest minus the lowest, times 1,600. The roster with the highest average therefore starts at 2,000, and one with the lowest starts at 400. Spirit's average was the highest, so its starting value was 2,000.0.

How head-to-head results move the score

The starting value is not the final number. Valve's page says the final rank value equals the starting value plus head-to-head adjustments. For Spirit on October 5, that was 2,000.0 plus 46.2, which gives 2,046.2. For Legacy, the starting value was 1,976.6 and the adjustment was minus 46.0, which gives 1,930.6. The lists show these final values rounded.

The adjustments come from the matches themselves. In the code, matches are processed in order of date using a Glicko-style rating method in which the rating deviation is fixed at 75, which the code comment says turns it into an Elo-style system. Each match is weighted by its age, and a comment in the code says a gap of 400 points corresponds to a 90 percent chance of victory. Valve's page notes that head-to-head adjustments are based on the rosters' starting values and are weighted by age but not by event.

The effect is visible on the details page, which lists every match. A win over MOUZ on September 6, 2026 added 10.35 to Spirit's score, while a loss to JiJieHao on August 12 subtracted 24.88.

When the lists update

Valve publishes the lists monthly. The 2026 files in the repository are dated January 5, February 2, March 2, April 6, May 4, June 1, July 6, August 3, September 7 and October 5, which is the first Monday of each month. The next one falls on Monday, November 2, the same date Insider Gaming, on April 9, 2026, reported PGL had set as the VRS deadline for the Singapore Major.

The tournament requirements make the monthly date matter. An organizer must use the most recent version of the VRS as of its Invite Date, which the document defines as the date invitations are sent out. The requirements also ask organizers to name, in their announcement, the publication date of the list they will use for invitations and the one for seeding.

How tournament organizers use the lists

Valve's operation requirements split events into two kinds. An Unranked event may invite anyone, but its total compensation may not exceed $100,000, and an operator's Unranked events may not exceed $250,000 in a year. A Ranked event feeds the VRS and must follow the invitation rules.

For a Ranked event, the requirements set out a sequence that every organizer follows.

The same document sets minimum sizes by tier. A Tier 1 event must invite at least 20 rosters directly from one or more of the Global, Americas, Europe and Asia lists, and its list of invitations always starts with the roster ranked first on the Invite Date. Its main stage, the stage after which no roster enters, must have at least 8 rosters. A Tier 2 event may be filled entirely by open qualifiers, which are stages open to the public, but if it invites any rosters directly it must invite at least four, and the requirements say their rank on the Global list must be lower than 12, in Valve's wording.

Organizers keep some room to shape the field.

Several details sit behind those rows. The Americas can be divided into one North America and one South America invitation for every two Americas invitations, and Asia invitations can be divided equally between Oceania, West Asia and East Asia, provided rosters then have a plurality of citizenships from the relevant subregion. A wildcard roster must, in Valve's wording, be ranked lower than 12 on the Global list and must meet one of two conditions during the preceding six months: at least three of its players were members of a top 12 roster on an invite list, or the roster placed first or second in an event of equal or lesser tier. The requirements also say wildcard and open qualifier rosters must enter at or before the first stage that features a VRS invite, and that no directly invited roster may start at a later stage than another with a higher VRS rank.

Valve also keeps a public list of exceptions it has approved. The 2026 entries include ACL X CS2 2026 and XPL 2026, which may invite 16 teams from the VRS instead of 20.

How the Major uses the standings

The Major Supplemental Rulebook describes a 32-team event in which all invitations come from the VRS: 16 teams are invited to Stage 1, 8 to Stage 2 and 8 to Stage 3. The Major has three Swiss stages of 16 teams each, where teams with the same win-loss record meet, followed by a single-elimination playoff for the top 8 from Stage 3.

The split between regions depends on the previous Major. One Stage 2 invitation goes to a region for every team of that region that reached Stage 3 of the previous Major, and one Stage 3 invitation goes to a region for every team of that region that reached the playoffs. The table printed inside the rulebook is still labeled for Winter 2025 and shows Europe with 6, 5 and 5 invitations across the three stages, the Americas with 6, 2 and 2, and Asia with 4, 1 and 1. The rulebook itself does not print a table for the Singapore Major.

For Singapore, Upcomer reported on October 15, 2026 that the Americas have 9 slots (6 for Stage 1, one for Stage 2 and two for Stage 3), with 18 for Europe and 5 for Asia. The report said the Americas lost one slot to Europe after the Cologne Major, where FURIA, 9z and Legacy reached Stage 3.

Invitations go out in a set order. Stage 3 invitations are sent first, then Stage 2, then Stage 1. They go to intact rosters. If a roster declines or is no longer intact, it does not play, and the next-highest-ranked roster receives the invitation. If no rosters remain, the open slots are filled by a last-chance regional qualifier. The registered roster must match the invited one, which the rulebook calls the Core Lineup, plus at most one coach and one substitute.

On the Singapore Major itself, GosuGamers' event page lists a prize pool of US$1.25 million and the Singapore Indoor Stadium as the venue, with play starting November 25. Insider Gaming reported on April 9, 2026 that the event will feature a third-place decider, a first for a Counter-Strike Major, that PGL set November 2 as the deadline for teams to collect VRS points, and that PGL Masters Bucharest, October 24 to 31, is the last Tier 1 tournament before that cutoff.

The rule changes Valve has published

The table lists the changes Valve's repository history records for the model and the rules, with Valve's own description where it wrote one.

HLTV's June 17, 2025 report named Wildcard and Liquid, which had split rosters between the Americas and Europe, as teams that would now appear only on the European list.

The three-month rule and the Singapore Major

On October 6, 2026, Valve added one sentence to the Major Supplemental Rulebook. HLTV and Strafe both reported it that day. The sentence says a roster is only eligible for a Regional Assignment if it did not appear in any other region's VRS list in the preceding three calendar months.

HLTV reported that the clause means a team that changes region must wait three months before receiving a regional Major assignment, and that it applies only to Major invites, not to other events that invite from the VRS. HLTV also said Valve clarified to it that the change takes effect for the Singapore Major and that the three months are counted from when Major invites go out, not from when the Major begins. Teams that changed region ahead of the Singapore Major are out of the Major race, HLTV reported Valve as saying, unless they reach out and find a solution.

The background, according to HLTV, was a set of late region moves: BC.Game signed a player named asap, and WW and Sashi also made late changes to qualify for the Major. Strafe reported that BC.Game, WW and Sashi made roster changes that gave their lineups an Asian majority. By keeping at least three players from a core that had already earned VRS points, Strafe said, they retained those points, which put them closer to Major invite positions than they had been in Europe.

Valve's list of exceptions then gained a line for the Singapore Major: BC.Game, with the roster of asap, Magisk, mzinho, s1mple and Senzu, is assigned to the Asia region and is eligible for a Major invitation. Valve's repository dates that change October 7, 2026, and the press coverage cited here does not mention it. Valve's October 5 Asia list, dated the day before the rule, shows BC.Game third with 1,318 points, the same figure listed for The MongolZ in second. The exception applies to that one roster and that one event; the rule itself, as published, stands for every other roster.

What the October 2026 update shows

The October 5 global list reads as follows at the top. Spirit has 2,046 points, Legacy 1,931, Vitality 1,911, MOUZ 1,863, G2 1,847, Falcons 1,843, FURIA 1,829, FUT 1,799, Aurora 1,716 and Astralis 1,674. The gap between first and second is 115 points; between second and third it is 20.

On the Americas list, Legacy is first, ahead of FURIA at 1,829, MIBR at 1,585 and 9z at 1,543. On the Asia list, TYLOO leads with 1,340, followed by The MongolZ and BC.Game at 1,318 each, and Lynn Vision at 1,190.

Some things the documents do not say. The standings repository introduction was last changed in August 2024 and does not describe the current factors. The Major rulebook's invitation table is labeled for Winter 2025, so the Singapore slot counts above come from press coverage. And the clause's own text counts the preceding three calendar months; counting from the moment Major invites go out comes from HLTV's report of Valve's clarification, not from the rulebook text.

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